The Gospel
After having completed the 12-16 and 9-11 sections of Romans, we are leapfrogging over the 5-8 section to the 1-4 section, and returning to the foundation of the Christian faith: The Gospel. In Romans chapter 1, we discover that the Gospel Paul preached wasn’t the ‘Romans Road,’ but was instead about Jesus, not us; Good News, not good advice; and not merely about saving our souls, but about changing everything.
God’s Surprisingly Big Story
In this sermon, Emily Morrison breaks down one of the most confusing and misunderstood passages in all of the New Testament: Romans chapters 9-11. Paul is retelling the biblical narrative, reinterpreted in the light of who Jesus is and what he has done, for the sake of the unity of the church of Rome. The story of God’s redemptive purposes is surprisingly big enough to include both Israel and the Gentiles!
Privilege Displaced
Romans chapter 9 has been misunderstood as a passage about individual election, predestination, and personal salvation. But Romans is not a book of abstract, systematic theology. Romans is a pastoral letter written to a church with factions along cultural and ethnic lines. Paul is writing to the so-called “Weak” and “Strong” to reframe the stories they’ve been living in. Privilege was an key part of what was driving these groups apart, dividing the Body of Christ. Today in the U.S.,…
From Zeal to Hospitality
Romans 13 is a famous text that has been used as a proof-text to justify state-sponsored violence for millennia. By reading Romans “backwards” (in light of the conflict between the factions in the house churches of Rome), we can more clearly see Paul’s purpose for writing this passage. Rather than sanctioning state-sponsored violence, Paul was transforming the zeal of the so-called “Weak” into love, honor, and hospitality. Paul was also reminding the disciples in Rome of Jesus’s teachings of enemy-love…
Christoformity, Glory, Hope
These three words, Christoformity, Glory, and Hope, represent the basic arch of Paul’s theological conviction for a unified multiethnic family of Jesus followers. Through what Scott McKnight calls “Christoformity” or the process of becoming like Christ in self-sacrificing ways, the Weak and the Strong – Jews and Gentiles–bring Glory to God when they give up their privileges and preferences for unity with the other. And because of this newly unified family of Jews and Gentiles, God will be glorified and…